Posts Tagged ‘habitat’

I’ll tell you, Supervisor Scott Wiener, for one, lives in fear of running afoul of these people, the very same people who vandalize the “no dogs allowed” signs our Feds put up on certain parts of our Federal lands:

Click to expand

Our Feds wonder why Bay Aryans can’t abide the rules the rest of America accepts with no trouble at all…

So look out, little Western Snow Plover. The dog pacs of the world say that you’re nothing special and that, in fact, you don’t even exist – they say there’s no such thing as a Western plover anything. OK fine.

Now, Ocean Beach Dog, ooh, somebody over there got an off-leash ticket from the Feds a looooong time ago. (Can you guess what year by looking at the website design? Sure you can.) Oh well. Well, the Feds don’t like Ocean Beach Dog and people what behave like Ocean Beach Dog. The Feds consider us Whacko City, USA because of outfits like OBD, oh well.

Most dogs don’t bother the boids, of course. Can you see the snowy plover?

But some dogs do harass the birds. (These aren’t actually snowy plovers near Lawton and the Great Highway but the dogs don’t know or care about that.)

(Get those Ocean Beach birds, good boy!)

And here’s the sitch up in Crissy Field:

See the birds, see the unleashed dog?

Is is surprising to you that an unleashed dog could find and chase these plovers? What was surprising to me was to hear that this particular boid flew up from Morro Bay (where it was banded and which is like way south of here) all the way up to the Marina District:

PORTLAND, Ore.— In response to a Center for Biological Diversity lawsuit, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today designated 24,527 acres (38 square miles) of critical habitat to protect the Pacific Coast population of threatened western snowy plovers in Washington, Oregon and California.

“Protecting critical habitat will help this lovely shorebird continue on the path to recovery,” said Tierra Curry, a conservation biologist at the Center. “Species with federally protected habitat are more than twice as likely to be moving toward recovery than species without it, so this puts a big safety net between plovers and extinction.”

Snowy plovers were listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act in 1993, when the coastal population had dropped to 1,500 birds and plovers no longer bred at nearly two-thirds of their former nesting sites. That Endangered Species Act protection allowed the population to increase to more than 3,600 adults by 2010.

Plovers are recovering but still face many threats, including widespread and frequent disturbance of nesting sites by humans, vehicles and off-leash dogs; crushing by off-road vehicles; global climate change; pesticide use; and habitat loss.

The western snowy plover was first granted 19,474 acres of critical habitat in 1999. In 2005 the Bush administration illegally reduced the critical habitat to 12,145 acres, eliminating protection for thousands of acres scientists believed necessary for the snowy plover’s survival and abandoning key habitat areas crucial for recovery. In 2008 the Center sued over the unlawful reduction of the plover’s habitat protections, leading to a settlement agreement with the Service and today’s revised designation.

Today’s final rule includes the reinstatement of habitat areas identified by government scientists as essential that were improperly withdrawn in 2005; inclusion of some areas not currently occupied by plovers but important for their recovery; and addition of habitats such as back-dune systems in an attempt to offset anticipated effects of sea-level rise caused by climate change.

The western snowy plover is a shy, pocket-sized shorebird that weighs less than two ounces and lives for three years. Plovers forage for worms, insects and crustaceans in wet sand and in kelp that has washed ashore. The word “plover” is thought to come from the Old French”plovier” or “rain bird” because plovers were seen on sandy French beaches during spring rains.

The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 375,000 members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.”

SAN FRANCISCO, May 24 — PhilippeBecker (www.beckersf.com), a San Francisco branding and design agency announced today that it is one of11 international designers and artists commissioned to create art for public display in the Presidio, in the first-ever public art project conceived for a National Park.

Commissioned in 2009 by the FOR-SITE Foundation in partnership with the Presidio Trust, 25 designers and artists were invited to submit habitat proposals for specific animal residents of the Presidio. 11 submissions were selected and commissioned for the Presidio Habitats art installation, including PhilippeBecker’s “Winged Wisdom”. [http://for-site.org/presidioHabitats/artist.php?code=2]

Winged Wisdom was conceived by Brody Hartman, director of creative strategy for PhilippeBecker, and designed in collaboration with Philippe Becker, creative director. “The American robin is an enduring icon in our landscape. It is a beloved bird whose behavior demonstrates nature’s ‘wisdom’, which in turn teaches us valuable lessons about how to relate to the land and with each other,” says Hartman. Winged Wisdom is composed of three-dimensional letters that spell out within the landscape three of the robins’ wise behaviors: ‘resolve conflict with song’, ‘adapt to change’, and ‘nest from the inside out’.

Each letter, built of steel armature and mesh netting, is filled with sterile straw, providing ideal nesting material for the robin. “Our hope is to give park visitors an unexpected, yet mindful provocation of nature’s strength and wisdom,” says Hartman.

Other installations include Fritz Haeg’s Snag Tower, Ogrydziak/Prillinger Architects’ Exhibition Pavilion, and Ai Weiwei’s Western Screech Owl Habitats. Overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, the Presidio Habitats installations will be on view for a full year. More information is available at http://www.for-site.org/presidioHabitats/about.php

The FOR-SITE Foundation, a non-profit organization, is dedicated to the creation, understanding, and presentation of art about place. FOR-SITE was created in 2003 to encourage the development of new work for exhibition in public institutions. Presidio/Site/Sculpture, a site-based initiative of the FOR-SITE Foundation launched in 2008 with Andy Goldsworthy’s Spire, provides the public with new ways to see, understand, and appreciate the natural, historic, and cultural resources of San Francisco’s Presidio, a 1,491-acre urban national park. More information is available at http://for-site.org/.